Servicing a Benrus Type I Class A military watch from 1975 with some interesting twists

by Eric GreenbergNovember 09, 2018

I completed servicing of this Benrus Type I Class A military watch from 1975 for a ClockSavant customer. These watches are “mono bloc.”The movement is removed through the front. These cases incorporate a “split stem” which is what the crown connects to. A split stem is designed to separate as you remove the movement from the case through the top. A solid stem won’t allow the watch to be safely removed from the case. The previous repairer used a solid stem. To accommodate the incorrect stem, they recklessly removed the dial screws and glued the dial to the movement and the case. The correct split stem for this watch is no longer available. You need to create it from other parts and you typically need the lathe to “turn-down” the thickness of the split stem you produce to pass-through the unique Benrus case. The saving grace here was that the glue used was removable with carefully used sharp tools and gentle scraping methods— still an ordeal but not as bad as I feared. After fully disassembling and servicing the movement, I was able to obtain top performance for the watch, as good or better than new. You might think my work was complete at this point, I simply needed to case it back up. Here we had another obstacle, as I encountered issues refitting the bezel. I discovered that the inner part of the case had been damaged from past heavy-handed installations and the case spring was no longer effective. I needed to make a new case spring, address the past case damage, and then carefully install the bezel. This watch is is an important part of history. It looks back at you with a great deal of seriousness. With most watches, you never know who owned a watch or their history. You can only guess and when working on them. Some of these watches simply speak to you. This watch tells me it lived an intense and very serious life. Running well once again, it is now laser-focused on its next mission.